


A Database Pertaining to Desmond Miles and Stomach Butterflies

by sajere1



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Autistic Shaun Hastings, Canon Compliant, Fluff and Humor, Getting to Know Each Other, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25739458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sajere1/pseuds/sajere1
Summary: Shaun had assumed love was a grandiose, dramatic thing, like a meteor or a revelation, ending the world. But falling in love - much like Desmond himself - was not, per se, in the dramatic heroics and the saving the world and the noble heroism. It was instead in morning coffees - in barbs that eventually turned good-natured - in the way Desmond listened to him.Oh, god, Shaun thinks, with something akin to dawning horror. Falling in love is BORING.[moments between Shaun and Desmond before the end of the world]
Relationships: Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles
Comments: 18
Kudos: 40





	1. Items: Guitar

At first, Shaun doesn’t pay it too much attention. It’s too bloody early to be worried about things. The loose acoustic chords murmuring down the hallway are confusing, but not enough so to pull Shaun away from the immediate allure of chugging a black coffee to get that nastiness out of the way and move on to better drinks.

It’s when he’s finished chugging the coffee, wiping the taste of it off his mouth with the back of his hand, that his brain finally stops mentally comparing the Silk Road’s trade routes and the creation of the Templar symbol, and he thinks, _Wait, is someone playing guitar?_

Not that it’s bad music. It’s kind of lovely, actually, slow and soothing through the walls of the warehouse. Not quite loud enough to make out any words, but the tune comes through clear enough. He’d subconsciously clocked right away that of the things templars would do upon finding them, showtunes was among the least likely, and so it was probably just someone on the team dicking around. He knows Rebecca doesn’t play, which narrows it down.

He expects it to be Lucy, which is why he pops his head in without changing out of his pyjamas. It seems like the type of artsy emotional outlet she would get into. He hasn’t gotten the sarcastic comment out before his voice dies in his throat, as Desmond Miles sits, perched on the Animus, strumming a guitar.

It’s not quite surprising enough to stop him from being a bit of a prick about it, though. “Oh, great,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You know, I was worried maybe you weren’t throwing enough big red neon signs up for Abstergo to follow directly to us, it’s a true relief to hear that you’ve taken another level of conspicuous nonsense to do in our _secret hideout.”_

Desmond doesn’t even look up, which is a little bit incredibly irritating. His mouth just twitches against its scar, as Shaun talks, like he thinks Shaun is funny. “Hey, Shaun,” he greets. His voice is throaty, naturally, but this early it’s textured especially rough. Desmond finally looks up at Shaun, quirking a brow and smiling at him, lazily strumming down the guitar. “You just wake up?”

“Well, I was up all night _working,”_ Shaun grumbles, crossing his arms to hide the sudden self-conscious blast that hits him, standing in front of Desmond in an oversized Metallica t-shirt (Rebecca bought it for him, as if all famous people are not inherently bastards unworthy of his money) and track shorts. He feels like a teen, all gangly and awkward, knees knocking together. “You know, that thing some of us do instead of napping all day and ancestral LARPing? Since they don’t let me go into the field, for the most part, something about me being an emotional liability – and, by the way, the fact that all of the assassins don’t seem to care one way or the other about killing faceless guards just because they aren’t personally relevant to them is certifiably evil – all of the data gathering has to be done through secondary sources, and they’re often done quite poorly, because they don’t know what the hell they’re looking for, which means that if I want to get actual work down during the day, I have to spend every other moment of my time sorting the abominations they call reports so that I can actually read them.”

Desmond frowns and presses his hand to the guitar, stopping the vibrations abruptly. “Do you need more rest? We can handle things if you need a few hours.”

“Please, Desmond, I’m a professional.” He’s not going to ask Desmond to play again, because he’s got some dignity, but he’ll hint at it. “When did you get that instrumental monstrosity, anyway?”

Desmond’s expression brightens. Desmond’s smile is a special thing, one that never, ever gets directed at Shaun. Shaun, in fact, goes out of his way to cause or see Desmond’s smile, because it makes Shaun’s stomach do some incredibly confusing things, and Shaun has work to focus on, he can’t be getting butterflies. “It’s just like the one from my old apartment. Lucy picked it up, last grocery run. I think she meant it as a gift.”

Ah. Lucy the sentimentalist. Shaun shifts awkwardly in place, not quite sure whether asking for more information would be rude, or would be too friendly, or would pass some other incomprehensible social boundary that Shaun doesn’t know about. Thankfully, Desmond seems to know that Shaun is curious without having to be asked; he smiles, again, focused on the guitar this time, as he rattles out a few chords in quick succession. “I learned it from a guy at the bar I worked at,” he says, fondly. “I was…shit, I was 19, or something. Definitely too young to work there. But my boss knew how to play, and on slow nights he’d pull his guitar out, and eventually I got him to teach me.” He’s not smiling, now, not quite, but his face is soft, relaxed – another thing that Shaun rarely sees. “Ezio doesn’t play,” he says, a little softer, in a way that Shaun isn’t quite meant to hear.

Shaun understands it, though. Or at least theoretically. Altair probably didn’t play instruments, either. This is something of Desmond’s that he doesn’t have to share.

Shaun is here to provide one thing, though, and it is hilarious distraction from all of That. “Play Freebird.”

Desmond looks him dead in the eyes and plays the first chords of Wonderwall.

Shaun snorts a laugh – a really embarrassing one, like a goose honking, so he has to slap a hand over his mouth as his face goes red. “Of course you’d be that guy,” he snaps, trying to look as though he has retained his cool persona.

Desmond, for his part, is beaming. His hands have come to rest on top of the guitar again – calloused, now that Shaun is looking at them, from pressing into the strings, lithe, fragile things, moving over the wood of it carefully. “I’m glad you like it,” he says cheerfully, which Shaun correctly interprets to mean, You showed genuine emotion, so I’ve won this round, you bastard. “I was thinking about getting stickers on it, making it more like my old one. ‘This Machine Kills Templars.’”

“Templars are already fascists. You don’t have to clarify templars.”

“It’s an in-joke.”

Shaun sighs overdramatically, pushing off the wall here he’s leaned against it. “Conspicuous, Desmond,” he says, putting his arms up wide for emphasis as he starts to duck back out of the room, to get into work clothes and away from that smile and those hands and back to the comfort of being the team asshole. “You should work on it.”

Desmond doesn’t reply – just smiles and turns his head back down to his guitar, and the sound of his playing follows Shaun out the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a place to put my small, silly shaundes shorts as i play through these games, because i love and cherish them. i have few more ideas, so i figure it's good to go ahead and get a place for me to post them now, instead of putting up 18 at once later.
> 
> catch me on tumblr @pechebeche, where i am playing through the ac games a decade late in the most absurd order possible!


	2. People: LMFAO (Band)

Lucy’s paranoid adrenaline frenzy lasts for a full few hours before exhaustion hits. Rebecca offers a break so that she doesn’t run them into a tree on the way to the safe house, which would be a terribly boring way to go after such a dashing escape. She still protests, of course. But when it’s clear the Animus needs some major tune-ups before they can get any further with Ezio, and Desmond is all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from the neurological cocaine that is the bleeding effect, he manages to coax her into releasing her death grip on the wheel and letting him take front. Now she and Rebecca are fully conked out, curled up against the animus where they’d fallen asleep gossiping, and Desmond is, tragically, at the wheel.

“I dunno how you got her to do that,” Shaun mutters under his breath, glancing at them in the rearview. He’s in charge of their route. Ezio learned a lot of things, but not how to escape a tail on his car, and Shaun would rather not let Desmond learn that one on the fly. “I tell her to get some rest and she goes mental, you tell her and she’s a little angel about it. That’s some Piece of Eden influence, right there.”

“It’s my masculine charms.” Desmond’s whistling along to some terrible song on the radio. He pulls a U-turn when Shaun says, cutting across traffic without missing a beat, bobbing his head to the tune. Shaun’s head is buried in his maps and reporting to HQ that they’re all alive and such, which is the excuse he uses for not paying attention to whatever garbage Desmond listens to until, at the start of a song, Desmond turns the radio up, and the bass starts hard.

“What in the fuck is this.” He glares at Desmond.

Desmond raises an eyebrow at him, doing that little smirk out the corner of his eye that looks amused and soft all at once. “It’s _Sexy and I Know It._ By LMFAO? It’s been out for, like, forever.”

“It’s garbage.”

“Well, yeah, that’s the point.” Desmond turns the music up again. Shaun scowls at the radio, where a man has taken to moaning suspiciously between lyrics. “It’s shitty club music. You’re not supposed to pay attention to it.”

“Let me guess, they played it at your bar?”

Desmond laughs. “Bar was too classy. I listened to it on my own time.”

“Desmond,” Shaun says dryly, “please know, if I ever have or ever do say anything about you that can be construed as anything other than an absolute loathing beyond the likes of your physical comprehension, it is a lie. To hurt you.”

Desmond laughs again, turned back to the road in front of him. “Nah, you like me.”

Shaun fully turns in his seat. There’s a moment where he sits, in flabbergasted silence, trying to word just how affronted he is and coming up with nothing. “I – I _do not,”_ he finally says, squinting. “And I would prefer you keep these disgusting insults on my person to yourself.”

Desmond rolls his eyes, but he’s still smiling as he does it. It’s – fucking frustrating, how at ease he seems to be with the whole thing, like he’s figured something out, like Shaun isn’t being incredibly fucking sincere with his loathing. “I _don’t,”_ Shaun snaps, a bit petulant despite himself, grimacing at Desmond as he twists back in his seat.

“Dude, are you pouting?” Desmond says.

“No,” Shaun pouts.

Desmond shakes his head. “Hey, whatever. If it makes you feel better, sure, you hate me.”

“It does,” Shaun snaps. “And I don’t need your – your validation for it. Not everything revolves around you, you know, and your stupid family history of egotism. It’s good to know that arrogance is an inherited trait, at least. Glad to have that in writing so we can move on to important science, that doesn’t involve you.”

It’s crueler than Shaun usually is, more direct, but less creative as he trips over his tongue, can’t find the words to be as clever and biting as he prides himself in being. Desmond still goes quiet, and Shaun is having a grand time pretending that it’s a blessing and he’s pleased with himself when Desmond says, a little softer, “Why?”

Shaun sighs, all impatience. “Why what?”

“Why do you hate me?” Shaun looks sideways at him. “I mean, you say you do. So why?”

“Because – “ Shaun wrinkles his nose. _Because you ran away from your problems and I can’t,_ he thinks. _Because when I was 14 you got away from it all, and when I was 14 Abstergo put two bullets in the back of my mum’s skull because I dared to get into it all. Because you didn’t get a normal childhood and I didn’t get a normal adulthood and there’s no possible way for us to meet in the middle._

“Because I hate everyone,” Shaun finally settles on. Desmond blinks, looking from the road to his face and back. “I’m not – look, I’m not great at reading social signals, yeah? Never have been. Say all the wrong things. If I say the wrong things on purpose, at least, that’s a thing I can control.” Shaun sighs. “It’s not personal,” he says, even though it is, a little bit. “I mean, you're also a slacker with terrible taste in music, so I especially hate you, but yeah. I hate everyone."

Desmond shifts in his seat, hitting the turn signal when Shaun gestures him to, not even needing the verbal direction this time. “Even Rebecca?”

“Oh, I especially hate Rebecca,” Shaun says dryly, and Desmond smiles.

“Isn’t that lonely?” he says.

Shaun snorts. “What are we, girls at a sleepover? Yes, Desmond, and also let’s talk about how cute Johnny was at school today, maybe we can paint each other’s nails and watch a princess movie while we’re here.”

“You don’t hate me,” Desmond says.

Shaun’s temper flares again. “I _do,”_ he manages through ground teeth. “I literally just explained it.”

“You don’t,” Desmond says simply. “You can say you do, but you don’t.”

Shaun scowls. They sit in silence for a minute. Which is worse, because this song is godawful, and when Shaun opens his mouth and starts complaining about it, Desmond smiles at him.

“See?” Desmond says, as the song fades out.

Shaun is almost snarling now. “See what?”

Desmond is looking at him with something like fondness. It’s a nightmare, the way that Desmond just takes whatever Shaun deals to him, the way no insult or personal hit will phase him, the way Shaun says something nasty and Desmond never says stop. “You hate the song, right?”

“I loathe it.”

“But,” Desmond says smugly, “you didn’t change the channel.”

There’s a moment of silence to that. Shaun will burst to his own defense, of course, argue the point down until his voice is raw and they accidentally wake up the girls. He’ll rail and Desmond while smile his stupid smug smile and Shaun will host his infuriating one-sided argument. But for a quick moment, before he can deny himself out of it, before he can convince himself otherwise – for a moment, he thinks, _Well, shit. He’s got a point._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had to look up songs that were popular in 2012 to find a really shitty one for this chapter and let me say, it was not a difficult competition. desmond miles has terrible taste in music 2k20
> 
> thank you sm to people who left comments!! i try not to reply to them so i dont inflate stats on the fic but it like. genuinely keeps me going. i appreciate the fuck out of y'all
> 
> follow me @pechebeche on tumblr for me to yell abt these two idiots whomst i love


	3. Location: Monteriggioni

Rebecca does supply runs on Mondays. The first time, which is really just a hasty stacking of essentials before they dig into work, Shaun’s criminal accomplice (Rebecca) turns him over to the fuzz (Lucy) at the climax of the heist of the century, the culmination of a feud which Ezio and the Borgias could only dream of emulating at their most cruel and efficient (stealing Lucy’s yogurt because she didn’t even bother to ask him whether he wanted anything, which, really? Rude). In the aftermath of this unexpected and riveting betrayal, Shaun knows his next choice of partner in crime rides on the most fragile line of trust, that to be forsaken again may very well be the end of what little hope he retains for the goodness of humanity.

“Yogurt?” Shaun offers Desmond, the only other person awake, flopping down on the stairs next to him.

Desmond blinks at him. His eyes narrow suspiciously as he looks at the yogurt in Shaun’s hand, back to his face, back to the yogurt. “…this is Lucy’s,” he says, and it isn’t a question.

Shaun squints right back at him. “How do you know about that?” He demands. Desmond goes stiff – curiously so, as if Shaun has actually stumbled on something secret. Shaun snorts. Trust Desmond to consider gossiping about his coworkers’ yogurt patterns confidential discussion. “Does it have her name on it? Is it Lucy yogurt? No. It’s the yogurt of whoever eats it. And surprise! That very lucky yogurt eater could be you, if you stop being a big baby about it.”

Desmond’s shoulders relax again as he smiles, shaking his head. “Yeah, alright,” he says, reaching out a hand. Shaun smugly rips the two cups of yogurt apart and passes him one. “You got a spoon?”

“I’m not a savage,” Shaun says, indignant, passing over one of the two plastic spoons from the pack of two hundred-something they’d gotten. Desmond shakes his head again.

“Whatever. You’re getting more if she gets pissed, man.”

Shaun sniffs. “See if I share my yogurt with you again. Bloody underappreciated, that’s what I am.”

They relax into a mutual, yogurt-ingesting silence after that. (Lemon flavored. Nice.) Shaun doesn’t really have a reason to be awake, to be honest. Desmond’s become the unofficial permanent early night watch – between his brain exhausting itself as it integrates new muscle memory and his body continuing to be the useless sack of flab it’s always been, doing something that requires attention but not higher-level thinking skills is the only way he can get any sleep. At about 4 AM, one of the others trades out with him, and Desmond gets to go back to lying down and doing nothing, which is, Shaun would argue, his single greatest skill.

It’s only 1 AM, though, and Shaun isn’t on the late night shift anyway. There’s nothing preventing any of them from wandering outside the villa at night, of course, so long as only one of them leaves at a time and they follow the usual precautions. As long as they’re back by sunrise, Lucy is reluctantly lenient on how the team spends their evenings.

But Shaun’s not exploring Monteriggioni. The idea makes him feel nauseous, looking out at the walls of the city – the same nausea that he woke up to in the room that used to be full of armor, the one that demanded he stagger out the doors and find something to settle his stomach. No ginger ale. So yogurt. And there were two, and he didn’t want the second.

So. Yeah.

It’s sheer luck that Desmond was sitting when he came around, actually – normally he does circuits around the villa to keep an eye out, regular checks on all the entrances and exits, a perpetual motion machine of paranoia. Right now, though, he’s sitting, eating yogurt, looking thoughtfully out at Monteriggioni’s streetlights.

“It has changed,” Desmond says, suddenly, through a mouthful of yogurt.

Shaun stares at him. Then he gives the yogurt a long, suspicious look. “Lucy didn’t poison this to discourage theft, did she? The container was sealed.”

Desmond rolls his eyes and bumps Shaun’s shoulder with his own. It’s almost…friendly. “Monteriggioni,” he clarifies. “You were talking about how you weren’t excited to be here, right? Because history is the study of change?”

Shaun stares. What he wants to say is, _You listened to that?!_ What he says instead is, “I did not say that would be on the test, so if you want extra credit for remembering it on your own, you’re sadly mistaken, mate.”

“It has changed, though.” Desmond smiles and shakes his head. “It’s changed – a lot, from the last time I was here.”

Shaun looks out at the rooftops over his glasses, the sort of measured, half-blurred vision that he only allows when he is thinking. The appropriate thing to do here, or rather the Lucy thing to do here, is to correct Desmond, _you mean when Ezio was here._ Can’t let the Bleeding Effect take another poor sod, can he? But –

Well. Two things.

First: Desmond technically was here. A digital here, and seeing it through Ezio’s eyes, but Desmond was riding shotgun. To pretend otherwise is doing a disservice to the animus’ capabilities. And – more importantly – well…

Shaun, when he was very young, before he got his parents shot for his curiosity and spent some very formative adolescent years on the run from the ghosts he spotlit, had a grandmother. His grandmother was sick. In retrospect, it was almost certainly dementia and very likely Alzheimer’s, but at the time he was 5 and hadn’t been diagnosed yet and every smell in the home where she lived was too much, too loud and bright for his overstimulated brain. His parents didn’t know that, yet, though, so he was still dragged along to talk to her – and still berated him soundly when he would correct her weak faults of logic.

Rule number one of dementia, Shaun discovered, when he was older and knew himself and researched every word he’d ever known: you can’t reason with it. It’s just not possible. The best that’ll do is reintroduce the panic and pain, every single time they forget, because they will forget again. The first and foremost thing is not the truth, it’s making them feel safe, and, if possible, quietly encouraging those realizations on their own.

The Bleeding Effect isn’t dementia. Best as Shaun can tell without personal experience, it straddles the line at some wild crossover between hallucination, delusion, and multiple personalities, none of which Shaun is especially well trained about. But he figures, extrapolating – there’s nothing to be gained from Lucy’s overzealous corrections, the frustrated insistence that Desmond is not Ezio and never has been and never will be and meticulously correcting any implication otherwise.

Desmond knows he’s not Ezio. Shaun won’t fault him for a slip of the tongue. And if he’s forgetting that for a moment – well, he’s got yogurt in front of him and Shaun beside him, and for once, he’ll be a hell of a lot more gentle than the other assassins would.

All of which is an especially long-winded way of saying that, when Desmond says ‘the last time I was here,’ Shaun’s brain races through all of this in about .3 seconds, considers his options, and tells mental Lucy to stuff it. “How’s it changed?” he sighs, following Desmond’s gaze, distantly, into the streets.

“Well – I mean, electricity, obviously.” Shaun snorts. Desmond’s lip twitches at it – it’s easy to tell when Desmond is holding back a smile, easier than most people, because the scar on his mouth emphasizes every little twist of his lips. “Modern stuff. The stairways have ramps on them, now, I think for cars, maybe wheelchairs too? Wiring and shit.”

“Well,” Shaun says wryly, “lord knows that when I said historian I meant electrician. Now I’m bloody ecstatic to be here. You’ve convinced me.”

Desmond isn’t looking at him, though – he’s gazing into the city, eyes half-lidded, chin in his hand. His yogurt is ignored in his other hand, resting on his knee. There’s a brief moment where Shaun thinks about how close they are – he could move his own leg just an inch or so and be pressed entirely up against Desmond, calf-to-calf, thigh-to-thigh.

“There used to be a fountain,” Desmond murmurs, startling Shaun out of his guilty thinking. “Behind the church. One of the statues was there – Jupiter.” He taps his spoon idly against his yogurt. “Maybe…maybe I just missed it when I was looking through town. But…”

Shaun examines his face, for a moment. Shaun wasn’t lying when he said he’s tits at reading people, and faces especially are beyond him. Instead, it’s all factual information, no processing the emotion at all, just the simple truth of how Desmond looks. His forehead is wrinkled, ever so slightly, and his nose, too. Eyes up and to the right. Mouth hanging open, just a half-inch – not quite cold enough to see his breath, not in September in Italy, but Shaun imagines he can see it, anyway, a half-puff of smoke. Slouched forward.

“Bet there’s lots of stuff that _hasn't_ changed hiding around, too,” Shaun says, turning his eyes to the town once again. “Whole point of archaeology – hidden underneath all the stuff that’s changed is the truth.”

Desmond blinks, like he’s coming out of a reverie. When he looks at Shaun, his eyes are clearer. “Yeah?”

“Well, that’s what I meant when I said it’s the study of change, yeah?” Shaun says impatiently. “Most people don’t get the unfiltered Ezio experience. Most of history – “ Shaun gestures widely to the city – “most of it is finding the scraps of what hasn’t changed in the middle of everything that has, and trying to figure out what it was from there. We don’t know what happened, so much. Imagine we were here with the bloody numbers on the wall and the knowledge that Ezio came back later in life – and there wasn’t an animus for you to kick your feet up and get the answers in. Just us and the few facts we have and our shitty modern reasoning.”

“Yikes,” Desmond says.

“Precisely,” Shaun nods vehemently. “That’s what studying history is – even when there’s plenty of primary sources, yeah? You’re still reading between the lines, still trying to find all of the mundane facts that nobody bothers to write down.” Shaun realizes, abruptly, that he has not eaten his well-earned yogurt in several minutes, and takes a moment out of the conversation to get a spoonful, swallowing it thoughtful after a moment. “So – you know. Maybe you’re seeing things that have changed that you weren’t expecting. But I bet if we really got to look at this place, we’d find a lot of things that haven’t changed, maybe things no one even knows are here.”

There’s a moment off silence, just the crickets, in the wake of this monologue. Shaun is already racing off on another track – where would be the best place to start looking? Some of the places that people wouldn’t know to look, maybe; the mine, or the well, places Ezio went that modern people wouldn’t know to excavate. In the catacombs again, a deeper look, maybe, at some of those wall bits that stick out, the miniature rooms that are impassible without tools. Under the houses? If the villa has secrets, then it’s not unlikely that the rest of the town – 

“Thank you,” Desmond says, softly, and it takes a moment to realize that he’s staring at Shaun.

Shaun blinks. His train of thought slows. “Er,” he says. Desmond smiles at him. “…well, I’m not a historian for _you,”_ Shaun grumbles, looking away for reasons that he doesn’t quite understand of himself. “Lot of stuff is hard to get to. Your fat arse is easier to risk than mine, might as well take advantage of it.”

“Uh-huh.” Desmond doesn’t sound convinced, but his tone is still warm.

Shaun leans back on his elbows, sighs. “If we were going to look,” he says, despite himself, because he’s gotten on this track now, he can’t exactly leave, “might want to start in the actual houses – not all of them have people in them, I’m sure, housing market and all that, and secret passages certainly aren’t unlikely in this damn city.”

“What, like – right now?”

Shaun waves him off. “Yes, right now,” he says, exasperated. “Unless you want to wait until the next time someone’s willing to take your guard shift and run the place, or heaven’s forbid pull an allnighter before your excruciating work of lying down and doing nothing for eight hours a day.”

Desmond looks at him. Out to the town. Back to him. “…are you sure?”

“Go,” Shaun snaps.

Desmond grins. “Thank you,” he says again, and even Shaun can tell his voice is grateful. Shaun grumbles something useless, but Desmond is already out, swinging his own body weight up the tiles, disappearing from sight almost instantly across the rooftops.

Shaun doesn't stop muttering to himself as he eats another spoonful of yogurt. And when Desmond returns, just before the guard shifts change, with a rusted sword in his hand, babbling cheerfully about how it belonged to Mario, and talking about Ezio in the third person again, a little scraped up and exhausted but smiling – Shaun’s smile is for the sword’s historical significance, and nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this doubled the length of this fic and also my brain REFUSED to allow me to continue brotherhood until i had it written so. first and foremost thank god this is done so i can go play for two hours, immediately get hit with another idea, and abandon the game for another week to furiously scribble my headcanons down before i lose them in the gameplay. Love Being Like This
> 
> if youre interested in watching me Love Shaundes With My Whole Heart, im @pechebeche on twitter and tumblr, and also recently started posting an incredibly self indulgent fake dating au over here as well! <3


End file.
